... King Lear (New) FOR the opening of the Old Vic's new season, Mr. Laurence Olivier had been set two problems of daunting complexity. He was to produce a tragedy which some have thought essentially too big for the stage, and himself play Lear, a part beyond the powers of many famous tragic actors. But the feeling that Mr. Olivier is now one of the makers of theatrical history has become general ...

... Message For Margaret (Westminster) ARE you the sort of playgoer likely to ask between the acts: Yes, but would he have done that? and to think it highly unsatisfactory that your companion should answer: But if he had not done that how could Miss Flora Robson so wonderfully be-- pathetically resigned, murderous, hysterical, tenderly forgiving and so forth? If you are that sort, Mr. James ...

... REVIEWED 111 ELIZABETH BOWEA Back The Becker Wives Grimm's Household Tales Uncle Albert's Manual of Practical Photography BACK (Hogarth Press; 8s. 6d.) is the new Henry Green novel. This novelist likes his titles brief. You will--or, if I may say so, should-- remember Loving, and, before that, Caught. At the beginning of Mr. Green's career we had Living and Blindness. In a less certain ...

... . By L. P. HARTLEY. THE KING'S GENERAL is an historical novel-- a blend of fact and fiction, as Miss Daphne du Maurier calls it-- whose subject is the Civil War in Cornwall. Corn wall, my readers will not need reminding, was always staunchly Royalist, and Miss du Maurier's hero, Sir Richard Grenvile, grandson of another, better-known Sir Richard, was the King's General in the West. As she ...

... THE current fashion for Trollope continues and is ably reinforced and represented by an American biography, THE TROLLOPES (Secker and Warburg. 30s.). This volume is the combined work of a scholarly mother and son, Mrs. Lucy Poate Stebbins and Richard Poate Stebbins, who together have written this chronicle of a writing family, drawing on the results of immense research. The book is presented ...

... or PARIS BOOKSHOPS iiizabm mum (on Holiday) ANYONE back again in Paris for the first time since 1939, probably-- after one general, dazzled look round-- makes for their old haunts. Your reviewer made for the bookshops. As to these, conflicting reports have been brought home by those who, since 1944 and the Liberation, have had reason to travel between England and France. Accounts of a book ...

... THE NIGHT AND THE LAUGHTER (Coliseum) COLOUR and music, there is a happy abundance of both in this particular night, but laughter is in almost total eclipse. Only one explanation of the misleading title occurs to me. The show was devised by Mr. Robert Nesbitt, and having duly arranged for a first-rate comedian to be in attendance, Mr. Nesbitt became absorbed in devising a series of ...

... Portrait in Black (Piccadilly) IF we fall into the habit of murdering people, no doubt the thing becomes a routine, and one job of work is very like another. But we have not all acquired the habit. We mostly like to think that murder in the theatre should be a bit of an occasion. The polite San Francisco doctor who wants to marry the rich shipowner's elegant widow, only murders (so far as we ...

... AT THE PICTUKEX Three Films SOME time in the nineties the late A. B. Walkley wrote something about dramatic criticism which I think applies with equal force to film criticism: The enumeration of positive judgments, of absolute truths, I hold to be no part of my business. To have as many impressions as fortune willed if irreconcilable, no matter about the same work; to find the arguments for ...

... ELIZABETH BOWES THE MERRY WIVES OF WESTMINSTER (Macmillan; 12s. 6d.) is the third volume of Mrs. Belloc Lowndes's auto biography. Its predecessors, I, Too, Have Lived in Arcadia and Where Love and Friendship Dwelt, have already established their place as classics in a particular field-- one must hope that, when the paper situation improves, those two will be among the first war-published ...

... fit For Heroes Worm's Eye View (Whitehall) THE two light comedies which may be seen on the same evening at the Whitehall (5.45 p.m. and 8.15 p.m.) are alike unpretentious and funny. Fit For Heroes puts a grumpy peer into a Portal house at the edge of his estate and gets its fun in part from the spectacle of lordliness bounded in a nut shell, in fact from the peer's vivid reactions to a ...

... reviewing BOOKS ELIZABETH HOWES Under One Roof NORMAN COLLINS has, as a novelist, a most engaging way with his characters. His attitude to them is at once friendly and crisp. He takes a liking to them; and this liking he communicates, in a most happy way, to the reader. He is never a bore about them. This may sound odd praise; but to me it means a good deal-- just as many excellent people in ...